


Words to confirm and delight

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Diary/Journal, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 06:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3758242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Even if Ralph did put it to him, he'd never put it like that.'</p><p>1965: Ralph Lanyon runs into some old acquaintances in Newcastle.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: references (non-explicit) to sexual abuse of a teenager (canonical and non-canonical); internalized homophobia; original character death; though no Major Character Death, situation in which Major Characters Are Dead, misogyny, Ralph Lanyon being his own exhaustive list of content advisory notes.</p><p>The title is taken from Basil Bunting's poem 'Briggflatts', which appears in light disguise in this story. You can read and hear the relevant extract <a href="http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/briggflatts">here.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



I first met Ralph Lanyon in 1982; we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who (not knowing him well) thought he might wish to contribute to the oral history project, then in its infancy, which eventually became the Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Streweminster. He proved to be exactly what I _wasn’t_ looking for: upper middle-class, public school educated, a lifelong diarist in whom the practice had inculcated the habit of shaping the raw matter of his life into narrative. My indifference was matched (with uninterest, as it were) by his insuperable contempt for what he invariably referred to as ‘all that Mass Observation crap you go in for.’ Nonetheless, on that first occasion I felt guilty at having so thoroughly wasted his time, and having no teaching that afternoon, offered to buy him lunch in the local hotel where we’d met. I stumbled home after closing time having eaten nothing at all, fifty years of vivid reminiscence eddying around my reeling brain. The next morning, still probably drunk and certainly intoxicated, I rang him and impulsively offered to edit his memoirs. He told me (to use one of his own phrases) to ‘state alternative preferred with reasons for choice,’ but relented sufficiently by the end of the phone call to agree to the promised lunch (though, as I recall, he treated me). It began an unlikely association that lasted until his death seven years later. We differed on almost every imaginable point―age, occupation, interests, social class, politics, sexuality, religion―and quarrelled about most of them at one time or another.

Like many raconteurs, Ralph was an intensely private person. His true friends were few, and he held them very close. I never presumed to count myself among them; I saw the inside of his house for the first time on the afternoon of his funeral (it was even shabbier and more austerely spotless than I had pictured it). I had personal experience, and heard many more tales of his extraordinary generosity, which could also manifest itself as breathtakingly imperious intervention in the affairs of others. I was astonished to find he had left me his journals, with a characteristically profane instruction to do with them whatever I would. I contemplated writing the sort of social history-via-biography which was then considered innovative and has now become almost ubiquitous. Fascinating as the subject-matter often is, the true interest of this sizeable record is in its own words: where personal matters are concerned often facetious and irascible, and yet in its descriptive and anecdotal aspect practised, genuine and natural. The audience for such writing in its unmediated state is necessarily small; in this selection I have confined myself to episodes which touch on incidents or people of note in their own right. I have kept annotation to a minimum, using cross-reference to the diaries themselves to provide background information.

Working with these journals, I have found myself frequently and unexpectedly moved; it was difficult, when I had done all I felt I could, to part with them. Scholarly conscience supervened, however: above all, I felt they should be kept in a state of preservation adequate to the needs of future generations of social historians. Streweminster has, to our sorrow, no substantial archival tradition nor the means in these straitened times to develop one, so the papers now reside in the archives of the University of Sussex, also the home of the Mass Observation Archive. Irony is for the living, as Ralph (whose atheism was as militant as his knowledge of Christian scripture comprehensive) would have been the first to point out. But I like to think that if he’d been around he’d have appreciated it.

Chris Willis

Streweminster, 1998


	2. Chapter 2

> The following extract, from 1965, records a meeting with the Northumbrian poet Hector Harding (1900-85), whom RRL first met in Iran in 1948, when Harding, then at the height of his material (though not his literary) fortunes, was the British vice-consul in Isfahan. On the occasion documented here, it appears that RRL was visiting the Armstrong Whitworth yard on behalf of the engineering company for which he worked between 1954 and 1967. ―CW.

16.xii.65

Arr/d N/castle late afternoon; journey tolerable.  Red Cavalry, AD’s gift, absorbed me to York, despite crowded & grimy carriage containing middle-aged husbands & wives who began a thermos ceremony of Japanese intricacy at P/boro that went on nearly to Doncaster. Splendid, brutal & lyrical (Babel, not oxtail soup & tea). Perhaps AD has finally worked out what sort of book I like. Exodus at York: young woman & small boy of abt 4 got on. Latter ticked off for  staring, I explained missing bits, or thought I did―our laconism more incomprehensible to the young than their argot to us. Clarified & she said 'the gentleman was in the war, Brian, like Granddad.'  Blanched rather, don’t know why, wherefore say not I that I am old & all that.

Town seems smaller than it is & really does  nestleunder fells, in better weather & stouter shoes shd have liked to walk them. Took cab to my hotel, wh. was no hotel, but a damned guesthouse, no bar. L/lady the sort of housecoat-clad sloven who takes to me. Struck me not for the first time that the friendliness of the North is a projected form of reserve. I have analogies in my own life but for that wd find it v. foreign as I think most southern Englishmen do. Dreaded room but was at least clean, tho’ a sort of cavern of mauve frills & static electricity. Voluminous, indifferent mixed grill & grey peas in greasy spoon. KL had recommended me a pub & wd have gone, with the usual reservations, but spotted this in local rag:

> [☞clipping from listings page of Newcastle Evening Chronicle, text: Hector Harding will read from his autobiographical epic poem Rawthey Sonata, Heber Tower Bookroom, 16th Dec., 8pm, adm. 9d, refreshments.] 

Well.  Well. WELL. ‘Autobiographical epic poem’ I cd well live w/o (acknowledged hazard of dealing w/ the man we knew 17 yrs ago as Bloomin Eck), & guessing the nature of ‘refreshments’ took care to go via off-licence for whisky. Arriving in alley under medieval city walls I understood the waitress’s look at my enquiry for directions: dense compost of shit & decayed french letters on the cobbles. I hesitated, it having occurred to me that tho' HH & I parted friends on the surface there was an irrevocable cooling after the Rahim business & he might not have wanted to see me.

> [☞ RRL’s diary:  19.vii.48
> 
> Row, muted but a row, w/ HH concerning the houseboy Rahim. He doesn’t, to his credit (?), pretend his motive is philanthropy & there is much affection on both sides. HH’s desolation wh/ R had 2nd thoughts & went back to his mother (a widow, she seems to tolerate it as a means of advancement for her only son, 4 sisters still at home) was genuine, total & the more horrifying for it. His secretary took one look at him, abstracted his revolver & locked it away. He said if nec. will resign his post rather than give him up. I told him not to be a b.f. He said if it were a girl he was marrying he shd have to chuck it, look at fr ex. old Oakshott whose wife was a yr older than R when they married. Then of course I just about told him exactly what I thought.  Marrying for xtsake. Queer sort of mad innocence about HH, the Quaker strain. Whatever stopped me from speaking my mind? Simply that I have done everything he has, I suppose, just not concentrated on one person. & that I cdn’t be sure if I had opened my mouth just then I wdn’t have been sick on the carpet.]

A tart materialised out of the shadows: the usual demurral received the rejoinder that I must be there for one of Mr Pickup’s functions. Never heard that one before, I thought, but I suppose I don’t get around as much as I used. Requested her to state alternative preferred &c. No retreat then poss., went up worn stone staircase into tower.

Middle-sized, roughly circular room, whitewashed walls peeling, gaslit, for xtsake. Made shrieking whey-faced beatnik crowd look like the damned, if the damned drank cider out of paper cups wh/ waiting for the ferryman to bother taking their twopences, wh/ he wdn’t had he sense. Large fireplace blocked up, 2 poisonous gas heaters cdn’t quite cover the stench of damp. Few bent-cane chairs, cushions on floor. Troglodyte on the door w/ NHS bottle-bottoms returned me change of a bob & a filthy look. The ones who think that b/c you care to keep your hair off the back of your collar you must live your life with a net curtain & a privet hedge between you & the world are the most amusing & I use the word advisedly. Looked around but cdn’t see HH. Was on the brink of bolting & making a vow never again to grouse about the company one’s obliged to keep if one’s to meet people one can get on with, when he extracted himself from a low armchair & a gaggle of girls, who were as prostrate as approximately vertical humans can be. It was clear the official bit of the evening had begun. Tried to find a patch of wall that wasn’t running damp to loaf against, not only failed but managed to end up about as far from the door as I cd be. He wears a beard now, hair white & as long as any of the kids’. On him it looked Dickensian, untamed eyebrows giving the impression of a seedy music-hall conjuror. A heavy-jawed belle-laide sat on an exploded ottoman at his feet & poured from the only bottle of wine in the room into the only glass. The doorman trog. opened ceremonies with an illiterate paean to an anarchist literary genius inexplicably of the same name as the washed-up diplomatic agent last seen futilely petitioning the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for a position as a teaboy. Remembered at this point I had a half-bt of Black & White in my pocket & nothing to drink it out of. Abt 10 minutes in I cd happily have swigged from the neck but felt need to maintain standards in this company.

It was  excruciating. HH had a pleasant voice in conversation w/ just enough of the North left in it to charm, wh/ he did, everyone fell for him. Now he exaggerated his accent beyond bearing, hawking & trilling the Rs like no northerner I’d ever heard, booming & muttering & squealing. A bit like L's drunk party piece, wh/ was ‘W.B. Yeats Reciting “Innisfree,” w/ a Cast of 1,000 Boy Scouts: Noises Off,’ but we were clearly supposed to take this  seriously. Considered growing a beard myself to have something to shrink into, seemed to go on long enough, in reality abt 40 extra-long minutes to contemplate how I might look HH in the eye after it. Actually there was one bit of it I liked, abt 2 kids hitching a lift in the rain on a mason’s cart w/ gravestones, then back in the kitchen they strip in front of the range to dry off, one kneels before the other & so on. It shd have been hot-making like the rest but it wasn’t, it was the real thing, exactly the way I thought abt L at school & for a bit after. I thought maybe that was HH’s bag, he’d never got over it & was trying to reproduce it w/ Rahim & the others & I ended by having to suppress a retch (NB: ask AD if it really does work this way, always seems too bloody pat to me).

When it was over at last didn’t much fancy fronting the mob that immediately formed around him. Courtesy is one thing, abasing oneself another. Sidled for the door to find myself  physically restrainedby the trog. I must have given him a fairly straight look, b/c he jumped back & I had to steady  his forearm to stop him falling backwards down the stairs. Luckily he saw the funny side & we smiled, after a fashion acquainted. He asked my name, gave me his (Jim Pickupp―nature of tart's aggrieved look explained). He said that HH told him to say he was sorry he hadn’t said hullo properly & wd I come to the pub. So Bloomin & I entertained the children w/ all the tales of old Persia until last orders. HH gave me a copy of the pamphlet so was able sincerely to offer congrats on its publication. Pickupp like a rat around strange bread all the while so of course I thought I knew what went on. HH’s boys used to be more prepossessing but he is bright if only semi-articulate―then he (JP) said he was  gan hyem to his  missus & bairn. Pickupp is 19. Felt fairly bloody useless to the race at that point. HH offered me a nightcap―a friend was giving him a lift to his house in Throckley & I didn’t see why not. & then I did. The friend was Andrew Raynes.

HH probably drew the wrong conclusion but whatever facet of his lunacy substitutes for social grace got us through the 20 min drive back to his cottage, wh/ was damp, untidy & dirty, any inroads into the grime & fire-hazard piles of paper clearly made by hands other than HH’s. AR moved to Throckley 9 yrs ago as newly-qualified GP, tells some sobering stories of poverty & ignorance in this decaying colliery village. It’s the right place for him: his sympathy is instinctive & illusionless. The word that came to mind & persists is  disinterested, in its beautiful Augustan sense. Cdn’t get a handle on what went on between him & HH. Thought bitchily that by HH’s standard a boyfriend only 20 yrs his junior was practically gerontophilia. At first HH benevolent & waywardly funny as only those who are pretty much screwed up cellar to attic can be. The half-bt of whisky did duty as a guest-gift (& there was plenty more in the house) but it made an already v. drunk HH fractious & mean-minded, dropping remarks in my direction abt imperialist & capitalist warmongering, gunrunning &c. that wd have been callow in one of his teen-agers. A sober AR tried to mollify w/o compromising himself. Cdn’t for the life of me get riled up: kept thinking ‘one from each war, collect the set.’ Another finger of B&W & I wd have said it too, but neither deserved that. HH suffered all right, nearly died of peritonitis in the Scrubs, he spoke of it (& worse) to me once, deep in drink.

HH fell asleep & AR wrapped him up in a big carriage rug. We retreated to the kitchen wh/ the range had kept a bit warmer than the sitting room. Conversation became broken but each time platitude threatened he anticipated me in restoring rigour, sometimes risking offence to do it. Recalled something L said at the time of our split wh/ I took badly, viz. I always sought to comfort him w/ sex & he felt suborned by it. If I’d known then who he was thinking of when he said it I wd have taken it a lot worse. At this remove I cd see more clearly than ever what attracted L to AR. Cdn’t resist imagining the physical equivalent of that unemphatic but fearless determination to set the terms. AR still v. good-looking. Bit portly.

To head it off (& out of something perverse too) I mentioned Rahim. AR said HH had brought the boy to England, sponsoring him & so forth. Two yrs after AR came here R developed an acute form of leukaemia & died within months. HH sank into appalling depression, eventually lost his job (sub on the N/castle Eve. Chron., xt, enough of a bloody crash in itself for the man who wrote that superb series on Iran for the  Times). Came close to drinking himself to death & only JP’s interest in his poetry plucked him out of it. But I cdn’t stop thinking of Rahim, his rather close-set eyes & perfectly oval face, like a Murillo Madonna, his body stippled with refracted light as he swam in the pool under the sycamores. Mawkish of me. No, more than that, part of the grotesqueness of the whole thing: HH’s sentimental fetish in life & here was I fantasizing him after death. Never acknowledged fully human & now too late. He (R) had an unpleasant knowing chortle. I blurted, ‘do you know how old he was when he died?’ & AR replied, ‘25,’ & I said, ‘No he bloody wasn’t, he can’t have been, because he had his 14th birthday when I was in Isfahan in ’48. Hector threw a rather splendid party.’

He clearly has a fair bit of practice in keeping an impassive face. I’ve seen AD do the same thing. Eventually he said, ‘It’s like being touched by something from another world. Utterly alien, but you know it’s real. I’ve felt it before. You know when.’

Hadn’t recognised my motivation until that moment but knew it was the worst possible one. You’d think a mere quarter-century wd be enough to get it out of your system & you’d be wrong. He got up & went to the sink behind me. I stuttered some sort of apology & he said, looking down at a milk-jug, that he didn’t want keeping in cotton wool, even if he’d pulled it over his eyes himself. At that moment all I knew was I’d had enough of such conversations for 20 lifetimes & I cdn’t face another damned one of them.  Esprit de corps. Making your own maps. Our closed shop.  Nous autres. Fuck that. Fuck it all.  Fuck it all. I stood up, leaned over & kissed him. It felt comfortable & quite natural but of course that doesn’t mean a thing. Then there was a noise in the doorway & HH stood there with the rug around his shoulders, like a miniature druid. We sprang apart reflexively. HH opened his hands & produced a phrase of elaborate hospitality in the antiquated Persian of the Bakhtiari. It was horrendous, unspeakable: a malediction. His eyes glittered. I cd have been welded to the floor, overwhelmed by every superstition acquired unconsciously at sea. AR reacted as he must in whatever emergency he comes across here, moving w/ simple & easy solicitude to steer him to the bedroom down the passage.

He came back abt 10 mins later & I asked if HH wd remember. AR said ‘Does it matter to you?’ & I said it did if it meant difficulty for him & he said, v. light & cool, ‘He meant it, you know.’ & hysterically reckless by then I replied, ‘I know he did, but do you?’ He considered that with a genuine gravity, v. touching in effect & said, ‘I think maybe I did, but I should drive you back to your hotel. It’s after two.’ & then I remembered,  not a hotel, had no latch-key & the consequences of waking the l/lady didn’t bear thinking about. (She might've liked it.) Admitted this & AR said he’d put me up, he was 100 yds down the rd & wd run me into town in the morning. His house modest & newish but the course of Hadrian’s Wall practically runs through the back garden. Wh/ I was alone in the spare room read the bit that I’d liked in the pamphlet but the glamour had evaporated. Hugely embarrassing―HH calling his prick a slowworm (spot on w/ regard to his whole squalid person, actually) but xtsake what was I thinking? Immense sense of shapeless frustration w/ it all. Attempt at relief painfully ill-advised. Pictured AR, of course & it got tied up w/ the poem somehow. Found myself imagining him as he was when L first brought him to the flat in B/tow but kneeling on the rag mat in HH's kitchen. Pretty lousy way for an uninvited guest to think abt his host who’s 2 ft away on the other side of the wall. Nonetheless rather urgently wanted it in reality. Not sure he didn’t too. How comic if he did. Afterwards felt like I'd rolled in phlegm & effluent. Slept v. brokenly. Woke in the dark to AR's alarm clock from the next room & the fretful, neurotic idea that shd now somehow always have to live under HH's curse.

> [☞ Glancing references in the journals suggest RRL maintained cordial though casual contact with Andrew Raynes. The next mention of Hector Harding occurs nearly twenty years later, and tersely notes his death.―CW]

**Author's Note:**

> Readers with an interest in 20th-century English poetry will probably recognise Hector Harding as a slightly blurred and fictionalised portrait of Basil Bunting (1900-85), and the literary milieu in which he moves that of Morden Tower in Newcastle. Bunting was heterosexual, but I've retained here the queasy predilection for youth which was a consistent feature of Bunting's sexual life. In 1948 he married 14-year-old Sima Alladallian. Sima survived him.
> 
> Though Bunting was never a member of the Society of Friends, he attended Quaker schools and claimed Quakerism as a literary and philosophical influence. He was a conscientious objector during the First World War. Refusing agricultural work on the grounds that it was effectively freeing another man to fight in his stead, he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs in 1918. He served 112 days of his sentence before his removal to a military hospital to treat a septic ulcer.
> 
> His anti-fascist convictions prompted Bunting to volunteer during the Second World War, and as a result of his intelligence work for the RAF he was offered the position of British vice-consul in Isfahan in 1945. He subsequently became Chief of Political Intelligence to the British Embassy in Tehran, a position he resigned on his marriage, whereupon he worked as a journalist for the _Times_ , also continuing his intelligence activities. He was expelled from Iran by the Mosaddegh administration and on his return to England experienced considerable hardship until 'Briggflatts' (1965) revived his literary reputation.


End file.
